No one seems to be neutral about the effects of EMU on the German economy. Roughly speaking, there are two camps: those who see the euro as the advent of a newly open, large, and efficient regime which will lead to improvements in European and in particular in German competitiveness; those who...

This paper presents the blueprint of a new ECB multi-country model. The version documented in the following pages is estimated on euro area data. As a prelude to the country models, this version is meant to enhance the understanding of the main model mechanisms, enlarge the suite of area wide...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

The European sovereign debt crisis represents an interesting opportunity to investigate the reaction of the European Central Bank as a crisis fighting institution and the importance of central bank personalities in policy execution. Accordingly, this paper aims at investigating to what extent...

The large Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) which the ECB started in 2015 on the basis of monetary policy purposes, had major side-effects on fiscal policy. One concerns the programme´s uncommon seigniorage effects. We find that the PSPP not only led to partly negative seigniorage gains,...

The model presented here is a New estimated medium-scale Multi-Country Model (NMCM) which covers the five largest euro area countries and is used for forecasting and scenarios analysis at the European Central Bank. The model has a tight theoretical structure which allows for non-unitary...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the ECB has experienced an unprecedented deterioration in the level of trust. This raises the question as to what factors determine trust in central banking. We use a unique cross-country dataset which includes a rich set of socio-economic...

This paper provides an overview of the operational implementation of negative interest rates in Europe and Japan. Drawing attention to the fact that there is precedent for negative policy rates and negative money market rates, the paper addresses conceptual issues and summarizes measures which...

At the onset of the Covid-19 outbreak, central banks and supervisors introduced dividend restrictions as a new policy instrument aimed at supporting lending to the real economy and strengthening banks' capacity to absorb losses. In this paper we estimate the impact of the ECB's dividend...

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with sticky prices and wages for the euro area. The model incorporates various other features such as habit formation, costs of adjustment in capital accumulation and variable capacity utilisation. It is...